Love Monkey (24 page)

“Come on,” I say. “Don't be this way. Shooter? I need you not to be this way.”

“This is not right,” Shooter says. “Dammit! How can we not have a couple of girls to fuck? That's not how it's supposed to be.”

“Well,” I say, “I have a date next weekend. This girl Liesl? She's kind of growing on me, and—”

“I'm talking
right now
,” Shooter says. “Let me ask you something: have you ever fucked a whore?”

Talking to Shooter, one does get asked the strangest questions.

“No,” I say, vaguely embarrassed. And embarrassed by my embarrassment.
I'm ashamed because I've never slept with a prostitute?
“Don't really want any diseases. Or anything.”

“That's idiotic,” Shooter says. “The whores I'm talking about are a thousand a night. And you know
I will pay
for you. Because I don't give a fuck. These girls will do
any
thing we want.”

Oh? I wonder if they'll be willing to lie for me. Because I have no intention of going where ten thousand men have gone before. It's not the girls I don't trust. It's the guys.

“Real men don't go without pussy,” Shooter says.

“Okay,” I say. “Call one for
you
.”

We don't say anything for a while. And then he slams a bottle on the table, hard. Fizz erupts from the top of the bottle. Bouncers turn. This is the portion of the evening when anyone who has a weapon is stroking the handle.

“God DAMN it!” Shooter shouts. “GOD IS A FAG!” Surely that isn't him on his feet, his arms jerking spasmodically? Certainly, he can't be con
duct
ing the music? And that can't be him rumbling toward the stage. It isn't him, negotiating—whoops—the steps. It can't possibly be his body shimmying up next to little Squeaky/ Allison. Pumping his shoulders and clawing at her waist. I'm pretty
sure you are not supposed to do this in a strip joint, and I really want to help him avoid trouble, but I want to see what happens next even more.

Squeaky, staying in character with admirable persistence, is making little mousy noises. The staff men start whispering and gibbering, scratching their asses and hatching a plan. Once they get their team together, they move pretty quick. Six guys are all over Shooter while he's telling the girl she needs to go home with him, now.

“Sir,” says the perspiring manager, trying to suck up and kick out at the same time, “as an honored guest, Stallions would like to invite you to utilize our luxury automotive service, with our compliments, and, uh, on the house.” The bouncers are making Shooter their bouncee. It's only two steps back to earth, but his legs go comically wobbly and he almost loses his footing about five times. For some reason there are hands on me, too, and without any locomotive energy on my part I seem to be gliding out the door one step behind Shooter.

Our limo starts up. We pour ourselves into it and head for Shooter's apartment. He finds another bottle of champagne in the cooler.

“Want some?” he says.

“No thanks?” I say, hoping this is an acceptable answer.

“Pussy.” He guzzles it heroically fast, straight out of the bottle. Then he finds the stereo and turns up Elvis Costello to a volume that enables any fans of his who may be in Queens tonight to listen. Shooter's head jerks spasmodically. He spills champagne all over his pants without noticing. When we pull up to his apartment he stays in the car.

“Is that all for tonight, sir?” says the driver.

“Yeah,” Shooter says. “Just wait a second.” And we sit there for about three minutes letting Elvis's “Allison” rattle the windows.
Then he puts his hand on mine. And he puts his other hand on my shoulder and pulls me in close.

“I do love you,” he tells my ear. “You know that? Because you
list
en.”

Which is not something I wanted to hear.

“I've seen another side of you tonight,” I say.

“But you haven't,” he says. “The other side of me is chaos.”

The rest of the evening passes harmlessly enough in Shooter's apartment. Shooter on the couch. Shooter off the couch. The coffee table falling over. Things breaking on the floor. My large glass of hangover-repellent water. His (larger) glass of Jägermeister. Me thinking, How can anyone fall off a
couch
? Shooter fumbling through his phone book. Shooter saying: I could have plates—plates!—of cocaine here to
night
. Me checking my watch: 4:40
A.M.
Me thinking, Can I creep off to bed now? Shooter giving up on finding the number, flinging his business-card wallet into the air and resting his head on the floor beneath a gentle flurry of white cardboard, just resting, plotting his next outrage. Me thinking, Run!

As I head for the door, though, there's a gurgling sound.

“Shooter?” I say.

He's out. But his tie is wrapped around the arm of his couch. He might be snoring, or strangling himself. A headline flashes through my brain. “HACK DUMPS FRAZZLED FRIEND IN DRUNKEN DEATHTRAP.”

I creep up to Shooter and undo his tie. His head slumps over. His entire body follows, collapsing into a weird Raggedy Andy heap on the floor. I put a pillow under his head and tiptoe toward the closet to hang up the tie. In his bedroom I flick on the light switch next to a hand-carved wooden sign that reads, “
MICASAESMICASA
.”
The light stabs my eyeballs as I look at the entirely separate stereo system in his bedroom. There's a stack of CDs sitting there, with Dylan's
Desire
on top. “One More Cup of Coffee.” “Hurricane.”
“Sara.” That's the one he wrote about the love of his life, the girl he wrote the entire
Blood on the Tracks
album for. The girl with whom, despite wealth, fame, and genius, he just could not make it work.

Shooter has one of those old-fashioned walnut armoires. I open the doors, and it's a dazzling sight. Pinned up to a corkboard on the insides of both doors is a riot of color, silk, cotton, lace. It's the Great Wall of Panties. Scores of them. I can't resist removing the pushpin that's holding a frilly black pair like the kind you see a supermodel wearing in
Randy
. I have to know. So I take a pervy little sniff. Yep, a girl was once in these. All the others bear signs of wear too. Some of them are brand-new thongs, others are ripped and faded Jockey for Her. I wonder how long he's been saving these up, and whether he hid their undies on them when they weren't looking or just came right out and told the girls they needed to give up a trophy if they wanted to stay the night. Probably he did the latter. Hell, they all take off their bras at Hogs and Heifers, don't they? Even Julia Roberts did it one time. 34B.

Suddenly I feel very tired. Shooter's lot in life has been to be grand marshal of a parade of writhing naked beauties that you normally can glimpse only by subscribing to the Spice Channel. And even he's missing something. Maybe the most important thing. Dylan had even more going for him than Shooter, and he couldn't get what he wanted. What chance do I have with Julia? Move on, sport. You lost. Try your luck at a different table.

I go back in the living room and this time I reach over the coffee table to turn off the reading lamp. There's a paperback of
The Sun Also Rises
that looks as if it's been pawed over a hundred times. I pick it up, running a finger along the cracked binding.

“Read it to me,” Shooter croaks from behind sealed eyelids.

“What?” I say. Is he talking in his sleep? Sobriety is creeping up on me, or rather, less drunkenness, the way the sky gets less dark before it gets light.

“Read,” he says.

“
The Sun Also Rises
?” I say.

“Just page forty-two,” he says. “Please?”

He farts like a trumpet and rolls over. I turn to page forty-two and most of the page is underlined. There are asterisks and check marks all over the margin.

“Read?” Shooter says. Pleading this time.

So I say the words to him.

Shooter doesn't say anything, so I put the book down quietly and turn out the light. As I'm heading for the door, he makes a little sleepy noise. I'm not sure there is any language left in him.

“Shooter?” I whisper.

He coughs up some muck with a rumble that scrapes my eardrums.

“You're my only friend,” he says.

I close the door behind me and go outside. On the walk back to my apartment, I think, That's it for the summer of horrors. I'm looking forward to fall. The new Dylan album comes out Tuesday.

I
asked to be excused from jury duty. But in my pocket is a green slip folded to the point of falling apart. A little box has a typewritten X in it. Next to it is printed
PREVIOUSLY EXCUSED EIGHT
(8)
TIMES
.

While I'm getting an Egg McMuffin at Eighty-second and Broadway just before nine, WINS radio says there's a freak accident downtown.

“A small commuter airplane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

My first thought is, I'm going to be in that neighborhood anyway for jury duty. I'll see everything. What fun!

By the time I get off the train, all the way downtown, it's nine-thirty. When I emerge from the Chambers Street subway station, I see the two buildings with giant black smudges on them. The smoke is out of control. Why are both buildings damaged?

There are hundreds of people on the corner, quietly watching. Every office building empties. Everyone is on the street, standing
shoulder to shoulder, the workaday rush slowed to a crawl. It's weird how there isn't any sound. No traffic. No hubbub. People are making calls on their cell phones, whispering. Waiting for something.

There isn't a cloud in the sky. Once a guy crashed a B-25 into the Empire State Building, but that was at night, in a heavy fog. They reopened the building within weeks.

I ponder my next move. Ready? Set? Brag.

I punch up Bran on my cell.

“I'm at the trade center,” I say proudly. Newshounds bathe in self-importance, which partially makes up for all the times we don't bathe in water. Proximity to important stuff, we figure, makes us important. We think we're lions but we're really the guys who clean the cages.

“The trade center?” she says. “What are you doing? Get outta there!”

“Huh?” I say. “It's kinda cool.”

“That's nothing!” she says. “Now the Pentagon's on fire!”

“The Pentagon's on fire?” I say, processing the information slowly. Blip, blip, blip. One moment please. A coin falls. A conclusion forms.

Asian guy standing next to me goes, “Did you say the Pentagon's on fire?”

“Yeah,” I say, arrogantly: I'm always the first to know everything. I'm in the
media
.

To Bran I say, “But this wasn't terrorism. It was an accident, right?”

“They hijacked the planes!” she says.

Planes, plural. Hijacked. Pentagon. Uh-oh.

“Oh,” I say.

I put away my phone and start walking. Must get to Centre Street to report for jury duty. As I walk into the court building, I'm zipping
open my backpack to dig out the notebook I wrote the room number in. Am I in the right place? One of the epaulets-and-badges guys is watching me.

“I'm here for jury duty?” I say.

He's windmilling his arms. “Cancel—”

But I don't hear the last syllable. Instead I hear a huge groan from the crowd on the sidewalk. I scurry outside. I look up at what everyone else is looking at. But all I see is dust.

“What happened?” I say.

A bald guy in a suit tells me: “The building just fell down.”

Where the south tower of the World Trade Center stood for thirty years there is now a column of brown smoke 110 stories high.

I want my mommy.

I'm calling her on my cell phone, walking north, walking west, trying to get service. Everyone is jogging into the streets, looking over their shoulders. Cops and security guards yelling
Git outta heah, git outta heah.
Some people are crying loudly. More of them are just looking at the ground, walking uptown in utter, surpassing silence. Pedestrians fill up the streets. All the cars have disappeared or parked. Cops are putting up blue sawhorses at intersections.
Git outta heah, git outta heah,
they say.
Git away from the buildings. Git away from the buildings
. So people look at the row of neoclassical court buildings, normally governmentally boring and squat, now rendered potentially lethal. Security guards and lawyers are hustling away. Everyone is frantically punching their cells, or lining up for pay phones. There are forty people waiting for the first pay phone I see. All of them standing patiently. No one looking at their watches, tapping their feet, yelling “Hurry up.” I'm walking, but I keep an eye on the other building. I'm wondering if…but no. It can't happen, what just happened.

Then it happens. In slow motion. It's like an elevator going down,
only it makes each floor vanish as it goes. Story after story becomes vapor. For 110 floors. There's steel and glass: now there's smoke and particles.

When it's done, a cyclone of brown smoke and debris starts racing up West Broadway to where I'm standing ten blocks north. Maybe we should…

“Run!” yells a cop. “Run! Listen, if you see
me
running, you
know you
should be running. You get it?”

The cops all pair up like kindergartners and run hand in hand. Some of the lady cops are crying. Some of the guy cops too.

We all jog up West Broadway but the twister is coughing and sputtering and running out of gas. It's not going to reach us. Then there's another noise. This time it's one of ours. An F-15 ripping, spectacularly, the sky.

Parked cars in the middle of the street. Silence except for the car stereos. People gather around them listening to newsradio. One car isn't playing news. It's playing Train.

The city has never been quieter. I can't believe it. Are these the same guys who, after trying to blow up the same buildings in 1993 by parking a Ryder rent-a-van full of combustible cow shit in a cement-fortress underground garage, were swiftly nabbed after they went back to the rental place and
tried to get their deposit back
?

I gotta get the Desk on the phone. After a half-hour wait at a pay phone, I reach Max, who orders me back to the office. The buses are ridiculously overcrowded and the trains aren't running, so I trudge up Seventh Avenue. Outside St. Vinny's, there's a sight nearly as
amazing as what just happened: New Yorkers patiently waiting on line to give blood. It's like the line for a superblockbuster outside the Ziegfeld, multiplied by about twenty. And no one is griping or perturbed. Just resolute.

It takes me an hour to walk back to Midtown. The street is as quiet as a Sunday morning. In the city room, there is no noise except for the blare of CNN. People are standing in front of the bank of seven TVs, watching fireballs. Nobody is cracking wise.

The Toad comes in behind me, reporting in unasked six hours early.

Max claps him on the shoulder, gives him an awkward little half-meant manhug. I wonder if I've ever seen Max touch another human being in a nonthreatening way before.

“Irv,” Max says. “We haven't heard from Eli Knecht.”

Occasionally we pay a penalty for taunting the animals of the world, for poking a stick in their cages, and one of them flicks a lightning paw at us. Or maybe we've just discovered we live in the cage, and the whole time we've been stepping on the beast's tail and pissing in its kibble.

Almost everyone is gone, out covering the story. I stand there with the copykids and Max and Irv and a couple of rewrite people and we all watch TV together in silence, all of us embarrassed by the idea that chasing a good story might result in accidental martyrdom, that a newsroom that smells vaguely of feet might secretly be infested with honor.

“Rollo?” Irv asks.

“He was at Langan's when it happened,” Max says. “So he knew about it immediately. He went down to the site with a cop friend slash drinking buddy.”

“Is he all right?” Irv says.

“He was right there when it collapsed,” Max says. “He and the
cops were all running away together. He fell, says he sprained his foot.”

“I hope it wasn't his writing foot,” Irv says.

“So he's going to do a column when he gets back,” Max says. “Did you page Eli again?” he asks Hyman Katz.

“I paged him a hundred and six times,” Hyman Katz says.

“Page him again,” Max says.

Hoff from rewrite creeps up and nudges Max, “Hey, boss. Does this mean we get free pizza?”

Stacks of pizza boxes sometimes appear in the newsroom—hack bribery—only during selected national disasters.

“Hyman Katz,” Max says. “Call Patsy's. Get half a dozen pies.”

A cheer seems inappropriate at the moment but everyone looks relieved.

Something snaps Max out of it, and he starts lobbing commands in every direction. “Hoff, you're doing the scene at the trade center, the scene in D.C., and victims' families' reax. Rita, international reax, the airports, the FAA, the scene in Pennsylvania. Burkey, the whodunit, the political angle, what Bush's going to do. Who's that leave?”

“I could pitch in,” I say.

“Tom,” he says. “Your pages are all locked down?”

I nod.

“Good. Do a ticktock. Of the whole day.”

I go to my desk and start checking the wires, pulling exact times everything happened for a minute-by-minute rundown of all the events. Like the newsman I used to be.

The Toad limps over.

“We haven't heard from Eli yet,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“We need somebody to be, uh…”

“To be?”

“Pre
pare
d,” he says. “Pull clips.”

“Clips on Eli?” I say.

“You know,” he says.

“Should I make some calls, or…”

“Not,” says the Toad, “just yet.”

“How, uh, long?”

“Page lead,” says the Toad.

“Page lead? Twelve? That's it?” I say.

I give him a look but he shakes his head and says, “I know.” Then he does the Quasimodo shuffle back to the Desk.

Twelve inches. A sidebar. Any other day, a
Tabloid
reporter killed in the line of duty is page one in our paper, and probably every other paper in town too.

So I call the library and get the clips. I've written a lot of obituaries. I've written obits on people who weren't even dead, just to be sure. (“No obit is ever wasted,” the Toad likes to say.) My Bob Hope obit has been ready to go for five years.

I've never written an obit of someone I know. And usually when you do an obit, you have to get reax. That means one of the hack's grimmer duties: calling the wife, the mom, the cousin, the next-door neighbor, the coworkers, and telling them, as softly as you can, that you're preparing a “tribute.” You don't say obit. You say a “story in his honor. Something to remember him by” and wouldn't they like to say a few words about what the loved one meant to them? They never refuse. They sniffle, they catch their breath, they talk.

The library brings me Eli's bylines, hundreds of them, years of work. But they don't even fill the shoe box that contains fifteen little four-by-six manila envelopes stuffed with tattered newspaper stories. What to say about the author of such modern prose classics as “STRAPHANGERS RESIST MTA FARE HIKE” and “HIZZONER
SEEKS ALBANY ALLIANCE IN BOARD OF ED BATTLE”? All of it, for the present purpose, junk. There isn't a clip headlined “ELI PROBE REVEALS SECRET LONGINGS, PROFOUNDEST JOYS.” I realize I can't remember Eli's sister's name. Donna? Dina?

I'm wrestling with the lead when the Toad yells over, pressing a phone receiver to his chest. “Tom,” he says. “I got Eli, he claims he's not dead. He's got stuff to dump.”

“Let's do it,” I say. My phone goes.

“Tom,” says a voice. “Christ, it took me half the day to find a phone that works down here. What was your lead?”

“Huh?” I say.

“Your lead. Read me your lead.”

“ ‘Amid the horror of yesterday's attacks, award-winning
Tabloid
reporter Eli Knecht sacrificed his life on a hero's errand when he was caught in the World Trade Center collapse after racing to the scene and filing the earliest reports from the catastrophe.' ”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. ‘Award-winning'?” he says. “Who says I got awards?”

“Like someone's going to call up and sue me for being too nice?”

“My obit's going to have lies in it?”

“Why should it be any different from any other story that ever had your name in it? I also said you had a big schlong.”

“Plus I didn't file any reports either,” he says. “Fucking cell phones are out.”

“None of the other reporters is going to call you a liar if you're dead,” I say. “We're talking posthumous Pulitzer here. Thought I'd do something nice for Diane.”

“Diane? Debbie!”

And I'm back in the rewrite groove: phone a weird appendage jammed between the shoulder and the ear, debriefing hacks in the field, discovering that I can still type as fast as a fast-talking reporter can talk. Without a word, the Toad takes a seat at the
computer next to me and pitches in on rewrite. Instead of pressing the phone between his shoulder and ear, the look that says hard-boiled, he puts on a goofy little phone headset that makes him look like a girl telemarketer from Phoenix. Our chubby fingers slam the keys together, making mad music of the day.

“Remember the view up there?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You could see the Statue of Liberty,” he says. “And all the bridges. At night they looked like strings of jewels.”

“It made you remember why you moved to New York in the first place.”

We're all hanging around the Desk watching CNN at about seven when Eli shows up. Rollo hobbles in right behind him. Our word warriors, returned intact in all their inky glory. Everyone bursts into applause. Momentarily trapped in our sincerity.

“Pots of coffee,” Rollo says. “Instantly.”